Foster design to warm up winter for Kazakhs

After the Golden Egg and the giant yurt, the latest addition to the architectural playground that is Astana, capital of Kazakhstan, is a mini-city designed to look like a three dimensional bar chart.

Norman Foster has designed the complex to include an 88-storey office tower, a "traditional" Kazakh market and a winter garden the size of a football pitch to offer locals the chance to enjoy temperatures of around 10C (50F) while it is -30C outside.

The project is part of the plan by Nursultan Nazarbayev, the authoritarian president of Kazakhstan, to spend oil and gas revenues on a new capital.

Following a masterplan drawn up in a day by Kisho Kurokawa, Mr Nazarbayev has built two intersecting boulevards, each a mile long and 180 metres wide. At their junction is the national archive, shaped like a golden egg. The transport ministry is shaped like a cigarette lighter and this year Foster and Partners completed a vast tent containing tropical gardens, beaches and a nine-hole golf course.

Foster's latest addition will be called Abu Dhabi Plaza after Mr Nazarbayev gifted the site to Sheikh Khalifa Bin Zayed, president of the United Arab Emirates. It will be built by a corporation partly owned by the government of Abu Dhabi.

Gerard Evenden, senior partner at Foster and Partners, said the design was intended to keep out the cold and maximise heat from the sun and was "a pure expression of environmentally sensitive design ... the towers are clustered together to conserve energy like penguins huddling in the winter," he said. "The tallest are at the north and turn their backs to where the cold winds blow from the steppes."